The Mayan calendar didn’t actually end on this winter solstice, but a Dallas tradition did: The elaborate yearly celebration run by Amy Martin concluded a 20-year run.

About 900 participants, volunteers and performers packed the Cathedral of Hope on Friday night. Early on, they joined in a chant to Shiva, the Hindu deity representing destruction necessary for growth and rebirth. That fit the event.

As Amy told the crowd — everyone in this annually reconstituted community referred to her as “Amy” — “We release it to become its next incarnation.”

It went out on a high note: weirdly costumed stilt-walkers, sensual belly-dancing, a man playing a horn duet by himself, folk music, French opera, Japanese drum solos, allegorical poetry, mythic story, broadly framed prayer, joyous laughter and more than a few tears.

“I’m really wondering what I’m going to be doing next year without it,” said Bryan Lankford.

He was in the crowd for the very first local solstice event and on the stage for this one, performing a magic act that ended with him pulling a rabbit from a flaming metal dish.

Amy, 56, is a local writer who got pulled into small summer and winter solstice celebrations in 1993. By the next year, she was one of the organizers and by the next year, the seasonal events became her obsession.

For only a few years, she battled the sometimes life-threatening June heat to run outdoor summer solstice events at White Rock Lake. But the indoor winter events became one of the largest in the nation and a cultural tradition in a city that’s always been short on such.

It was a tradition built to meet the needs of a rapidly growing slice of the population: People whose ideas about religion don’t fit neatly into what used to be the American mainstream. Amy’s winter solstice events became an unprecedented annual gathering for hundreds of such people in North Texas.

This would be her last, Amy said a few days before the solstice, because she’d burned out.

“We grew much faster than I could keep up with,” she said.

The winter solstice is the day with the shortest period of sunlight. Many cultures over the millennia tied turnaround rituals to the date — the longest darkness giving way to the rebirth that leads to spring.

What started in 1993 with that first assembly of a few dozen people moved to the Unitarian Church of Dallas and, in 2000, to the Cathedral of Hope, all the while getting larger and more elaborate.

Over the years the events included all manner of performance tied together by Amy’s remarkably effective ideas about ritual, borrowed and adjusted from a broad array of religious and non-religious traditions.

Her refusal to be tied down — and to include as many ideas as possible — allowed the event to draw people representing a broad spectrum of spiritual ideas: Buddhist, Hindu, Wiccan, Pagan, Unity, New Thought and American Indian, as well as a couple of flavors of Christianity. Not to mention people uninterested in being pegged as anything in particular — the so-called “Nones.”

She’d almost let it go six years ago, wearying of the effort. At that time, she and several of her supporters formed a small non-profit organization called Earth Rhythms that was supposed to take on the organizational and production responsibilities.

“I had a 500-pound weight on my back and it got reduced to 250,” she said last week. “But what I could carry was 50.”

Rodney Steman has been the producer for the solstice event for several years. He’s now taking over from Amy as executive director of Earth Rhythms. The goal of bringing together the disparate faith communities will go on, he said. But the elaborate winter events won’t be part of the mix.

“I don’t know that anyone else can pull that off,” he said. “If anybody wants to try, I wish them all the luck in the world and will help them any way I can. Just not producing.”

Why didn’t the obvious interest in the event evolve into an organization that could sustain it beyond the strength and creativity of one insanely committed creator? Amy sighed when asked about that.

“We grew along with the rise of the Nones, but I think we were still a little ahead of our time,” she said. “The Nones haven’t realized the need for institutions. They don’t get it yet.”

But they loved it, nonetheless. Some of those in the crowd and on the stage had been there for many of the events. Some were returning for a last farewell after years away.

Russ Sharek directs Circus Freaks, a small Richardson-based circus troupe. He and Catherine Chambers were the stilt-walking “avatars” of, well, something symbolic Friday night. Dressed in black and wearing opaque, reflective masks, with a glowing circle over their hearts, they carried a silver balloon that represented the “pearl of wisdom,” Amy told the crowd.

Before the event, Sharek explained how he and some of his fellow performers had been given opportunities at earlier solstices.

“We’ve come back to say thank you,” he said. “With the exception of this room, there ain’t a lot of places to get your solstice on.”

So what will happen next year? The room was filled with theories.

Some figure Amy will change her mind sooner or later. But she seemed very serious about leaving it behind.

Some think that some other person or group will come forward to run the show. But nobody could think of any one group with the standing to pull it off.

Others figured that there would be myriad smaller solstice events. Several of the groups represented Friday are already discussing that, though those would lack the diversity of Amy’s celebrations.

Amy thinks that next year may come and go without a major community event, as people wait to see if she really meant it. But enough people may miss it, she thinks, that somebody will step forward to re-create the solstice celebration in some new image.

Lankford, who is also a member of the Earth Rhythms board, alluded to that Friday night during his magic set. He asked how many were there for the first time and a bunch of people applauded.

“How many of you are thinking ‘Oh no! I just found this,’” he said. “And now it’s going away.”

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